Police on the lookout for potential suicide bombers in London stop more young white males than anyone else, according to figures released by Scotland Yard yesterday.

More than half of the 32,000 people stopped under the Terrorism Act between April and August this year were white. The largest proportion of those were aged between 21 and 40.

For the first time Scotland Yard published a breakdown of its stop-and-search figures to show who is being stopped and where those stops are taking place.

Police stopped 17,348 whites, 6,755 Asians and 4,287 blacks. Males were far more likely to be stopped than females, with 28,022 men asked to account for their movements compared with 2,489 women.

A police spokesman said that there was no fixed profile for suicide bombers, but admitted that despite the figures, Asians were still proportionally more likely to stopped than any other ethnic group.

“There are three times more white people stopped than Asian people. But Asian people form a much smaller proportion of the population and you are 2.1 times more likely to be stopped if you are Asian,” he said.

Since the failed car bomb attacks in London and at Glasgow airport this summer, part of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism strategy has been to stop and search more people in the capital to create a visible deterrent to potential terrorists.

Search operations are focused on popular buildings, railway stations, airports and other areas likely to be targeted by al-Qaeda.

Most of the operations took place in the City of Westminster, where there were 9,100 searches. In Tower Hamlets, which has a large Asian Muslim population, there were 2,976 searches, about a fifth of them on vehicles. Scotland Yard said that the high level could be explained because the borough was near the financial district and contained Canary Wharf.

The neighbouring borough of Hackney recorded the lowest level of searches, just 186 in the four months under examination.

At Heathrow there were 2,335 searches, and 802 at City airport in East London.

A spokeswoman for Liberty, the civil rights organisation, said that the widespread use of stop-and-search powers could prove counterproductive. “Our concern is about what will happen if stop-and-search continues to be used as an everyday power rather than an extraordinary power, which is what was intended.

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